Cheryl Coleman worked as a cashier at Price Chopper to pay for her dream of becoming a teacher.

She succeeded — for three years.

Then, in 1980, Coleman's job teaching middle-schoolers English in Mechanicville was cut. Facing an unknown future, she chose a path she had never before considered — law school.

"I actually never thought I was smart enough," Coleman, 58, said in a recent interview in her 14th-floor office at 90 State St. that is decorated with mementos of her courtroom successes and her lifelong passion for the New York Yankees. "Right from the start, the criminal law thing really interested me. I just realized I was really good at it."

Coleman graduated in the top 10 percent of her 1985 class at Albany Law School. Since then she has worn many hats — prosecutor, defense attorney and judge — not all of which fit. Besides wrong career decisions, she faced professional controversy and the devastating loss of a child.

But if Coleman is, as she claims, heading into the last five years of her career, she is going out on top. Whether Cheryl Coleman is the best defense lawyer in the Capital Region might be open to debate. That she is among the few who can make that claim is not.

All Coleman seems to do is win. Her list of clients in recent years who were acquitted or had their cases tossed includes gang members and alleged sex assailants as well as Albany police officers accused of breaking the law.

Her victories range from representing Michael LoPorto, who was cleared of all 22 counts he faced in the high-profile Troy ballot fraud trial, to the case of Christopher Oathout, who was in prison serving 25 years to life for a 2006 killing until Coleman fought to get his conviction overturned by the state's highest court. He recently pleaded guilty to manslaughter and is expected to be released in October.

"She has the ability to make things simple and understandable for the jury," said Trey Smith, the special prosecutor on the ballot fraud case. "She's a great communicator. She's one of the best attorneys that I've ever gone against in the role as a prosecutor."

Coleman, one of three daughters of John Fascia, the longtime mayor of Mechanicville, believes many people unfortunately best remember her as the prosecutor in the case of Ralph Tortorici, a University at Albany student who, armed with a hunting knife and rifle, held fellow students hostage in a lecture hall, where he shot one and stabbed another.

Tortorici was convicted after his insanity defense failed, and hanged himself in his prison cell in 1999.

Coleman also was once dogged by headlines about her fight while she was a judge with women who were arrested at a 2003 Bon Jovi concert, and the embarrassing photo her ex-husband distributed showing her dressed at a 1988 Halloween party as Tawana Brawley, a black Wappingers Falls teenager whose claim of rape by six white men was later exposed as a hoax.

"I learned a lot from screwing up," Coleman said. "I had never screwed up before ... my ego took a beating. It was probably exactly what I needed."

Coleman's losses now are rare. In her first trial as a defense attorney, she won a stunning acquittal for Jeffrey Hampshire, who was charged with killing a 91-year-old relative of his girlfriend and burying her in Stillwater. She was, however, unable to sway the jury in the case of Bloods gang member James Wells of Brooklyn, who was convicted in March of murdering Schenectady High School basketball standout Eddie Stanley in 2011.

While some attorneys are reluctant to offer opinions outside a courtroom, Coleman will freely voice her thoughts on topics ranging from the Yankees to her own cases. She is not afraid to blast prosecutors. And Coleman doesn't blink at critics upset at her for defending some of the most violent people in the region.

"I'm still going to exploit every single weakness in the case because it is my job to do the best I can for them," Coleman said. "And if that comes from walking somebody that's guilty, I'm going to walk somebody that's guilty any day of the week — and it doesn't bother me. I sleep like a baby."

Coleman's at-times brash persona, in or out of court, belies a woman who has suffered great personal tragedy. On June 23, 1997, Coleman's 6-year-old daughter, Caitlin, died. The child's heart stopped while Coleman was prosecuting a murder case. Her son, Brian, 20, has autism.

Coleman remains close with her own family. She and her younger sister, Cindy Fascia, an attorney for the state Department of Health, attend several Yankee games a year, a tradition that started when their father regularly took them to Yankee Stadium as kids.

Fascia recalled that when her big sister was 5, Cheryl was asked to draw a picture of herself as an adult — and drew herself planting a flag on the moon, long before it had been done.

"Not a lot of 5-year-old girls in Mechanicville have that kind of vision of themselves," Fascia said.

Coleman was not in law school long before she found the interest that would define her. In her second year, she interned at the district attorney's office. There she met Dan Dwyer, then chief assistant to longtime Albany County District Attorney Sol Greenberg and a mentor for Coleman the prosecutor. After graduation and working at the now-defunct firm of Rowley, Forrest and O'Donnell, Coleman joined Dwyer's office.

"Every trial was like a war to him," she said. "He made you see things very black and white which is, I guess, kinda how I saw things when I was an ADA in a lot of ways."

Coleman started out handling appeals and spent several years prosecuting drunken driving and vehicular crimes. By 1995, she was prosecuting violent crimes. The convictions piled up. She put away, among others, Bronx gang member Allen Johnson for the 1996 murder of a stranger in a death penalty-eligible case; Brian Alburger, a Rotterdam man who beat, strangled and smothered the mother of his out-of-wedlock baby in 1994; and Jose Lopez, the assailant who in 1989 stabbed the curator of the Albany Institute of History & Art in her home.

"I never thought about being a defense attorney back then," Coleman said. "I thought about being a DA. That was like the best job anybody could have."

As a prosecutor, she said, she always believed the defendant was in the wrong. Two cases changed that: Tortorici and Kevin Cherry, who was charged with a 1999 murder until police learned he was the wrong man.

"It blew me away," Coleman said. "Then I started to think about people I had convicted on less evidence and it kind of blew the whole foundation. And this is a point in time when I'm seriously thinking of running for DA."

Cherry, a Bloods member, is now serving a life sentence for an unrelated 2001 double murder in West Hill.

The Tortorici case was chronicled in the 2002 PBS Frontline documentary, "A Case of Insanity."

"I wish I'd never been involved in it," Coleman said. "I learned a lot from it. I wish I hadn't had to learn that."

She became a defense attorney, a transition she described as easy, only after a well-documented pursuit to succeed Greenberg, who famously resigned to allow successor Paul Clyne to take over and win re-election. An irked Coleman and Bryan Rounds left the office together in 2000 and started their own firm. Eventually, she made peace with Greenberg and Clyne.

"I know that I understand myself and I know I probably would have made every bit as bad a DA as I was a judge — and that's the truth," Coleman said.

Coleman then served as an Albany City Court Judge from 2002 to 2004. She said of that experience: "I probably enjoyed being on the bench for maybe three weeks ... on the best days it was just really boring. I couldn't believe I was doing it." When she returned to practice law in 2004 she started from the ground up.

"I loved my time as a prosecutor," said Coleman, who is married to Larry Walley, a former sheriff's investigator. "I wouldn't have traded it for anything. But this is the best time of my life. This is awesome. Maybe it's just because I feel like everything came together. I love every day."